Hysteria is the fourth studio album by English hard rock band Def Leppard, released on 3 August 1987 through Mercury Records and reissued on 1 January 2000. It is the band's best-selling album to date, selling over 20 million copies worldwide, including 12 million in the US, and spawning seven hit singles. The album charted at #1 on both the Billboard 200 and the UK Albums Chart.[2][3]

Hysteria was produced by Robert John "Mutt" Lange. The title of the album was thought up by drummer Rick Allen, referring to his 1984 auto accident and the ensuing worldwide media coverage surrounding it. It is also the last album to feature guitarist Steve Clark before his death, although songs co-written by him would appear in the band's next album, Adrenalize.

The album is the follow-up to the band's 1983 breakthrough Pyromania. Hysteria's creation took over three years and was plagued by delays, including the aftermath of the 31 December 1984 car accident that cost drummer Rick Allen his left arm. Subsequent to the album's release, Def Leppard published a book entitled Animal Instinct: The Def Leppard Story, written by Rolling Stone magazine Senior Editor David Fricke, on the three-year recording process of Hysteria and the tough times the band endured through the mid-1980s.

Hysteria has earned critical acclaim from a number of sources. In 1988 Q magazine readers voted it as the 98th Greatest Album of All Time, while in 2004, the album was ranked at #472 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.[4]

Clocking in at 62 and a half minutes, the album was, at the time, one of the longest albums ever issued on a single vinyl record.

Contents

Initially, Hysteria was to be named Animal Instinct and produced by Lange, but he dropped out after pre-production sessions, citing exhaustion from a gruelling schedule from the past few years. Meat Loaf songwriter Jim Steinman was brought in. Steinman's involvement was a disaster because he was more interested in making a raw rock n' roll record and capturing the moment, warts and all, while the band was still interested in a bigger, more pristine pop production.[5] Joe Elliott later stated in interview: "Todd Rundgren produced (Meat Loaf's) Bat out of Hell. Jim Steinman WROTE it".[5] After parting ways with Steinman, the band tried to produce the album themselves with Lange's engineer Nigel Green with no success, and initial recording sessions were entirely scrapped.

On 31 December 1984, Rick Allen lost his left arm when his Corvette flipped off a country road. Following the accident, the band stood by Allen's decision to return to the drum kit despite his disability, using a combination electronic/acoustic kit with a set of Def pedals that triggered (via MIDI) the hits he would have played with his left arm. The band slowly soldiered on until Mutt Lange made a surprise return a year later, and Allen mastered his customised drum kit. However, the sessions were further delayed by Lange's own auto accident (sustaining leg injuries from which he quickly recovered) and a bout of the mumps suffered by singer Joe Elliott in 1986.

The final recording sessions took place in January 1987 for the song "Armageddon It", but Lange spent another three months mixing the tracks. The album was finally released worldwide on 3 August 1987, with "Animal" as the lead single in most countries except for the US where "Women" was the first single.

In the liner notes to the album, the band apologised for the long wait between albums, and promised to never make fans wait that long between albums again. Later events, namely the death of Steve Clark, proved that a hard promise to keep.

Fortunately for the band, their popularity in their homeland had significantly grown over the past four years, and Hysteria topped the charts in Britain in its first week of release. The album was also a major success in other parts of Europe. In the United States however the band at first struggled to regain the momentum of Pyromania that was lost from such a prolonged absence. The success of the album's fourth single, "Pour Some Sugar on Me" would propel the album to the top of the US Billboard 200 albums chart nearly a year after its release. In the Billboard issue dated 8 October 1988, Def Leppard held the #1 spot on both the singles and album charts with "Love Bites" and Hysteria, respectively.

Hysteria went on to dominate album charts around the world for three years. It was certified 12x platinum by the RIAA in 2009. The album currently sits as the 51st best selling album of all time in the US. It spent 96 weeks in the US top 40, a record for the 1980s it ties with Born in the U.S.A.[6][7] The album has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.[8]

The leadoff track, "Women", was selected as the first single for the US, instead of "Animal", in July 1987. Then-manager Cliff Burnstein reasoned that the band needed to reconnect with their hard rock audience first before issuing more Top 40-friendly singles. The strategy backfired somewhat as "Women" did not make a large impact on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at #80. It was a top 10 hit on the rock chart though, peaking at #7. Six more singles were subsequently released in the United States, with "Love Bites" reaching #1, and three others reaching the top ten. The singles earned similar success in the United Kingdom.

On 24 October 2006, a 2 CD "deluxe edition" of the album was released, including a re-mastering of the original b-sides and bonus tracks from the album's period. Many of these songs had been featured on Retro Active, albeit with remixes, revamps, and new parts added. The deluxe edition Hysteria deluxe CD included the original b-side versions of these recordings without alterations.

During the March 22 through April 10, 2013 residency at The Joint, Def Leppard performed the album in its entirety, from start to finish. This was followed up with a live album Viva! Hysteria recorded during the residency and released on October 22, 2013, which includes all of Hysteria being played live.

The album's goal, set out by Lange, was to be a rock version of Michael Jackson's Thriller, in that every track was a potential hit single. Songs were therefore written with this concept in mind, disappointing heavy metal fans who clamoured for a straight sequel to Pyromania. One song, "Love Bites", was already mostly written in the vein of a country ballad by Mutt Lange when he brought it to the band's attention.

While Pyromania contained traces of Def Leppard's original traditional heavy metal sound found on their first two albums, Hysteria removed them in favour of the latest sonic technology available at the time (best displayed on "Rocket", "Love Bites", "Excitable", and "Gods of War"). As with Pyromania, every song was recorded by every member in the studio separately instead of the whole band. The multiple vocal harmonies were enhanced by Lange's techniques, even pitching background vocals on all tracks. Guitar parts were now focused more on emphasising melody than hard rock's more basic and cliched riffs. The band used the Rockman amplifier, developed by guitarist Tom Scholz from the rock band Boston, to record the album, which engineer Mike Shipley described as "a shitty little box" with "a godawful sound" that "had no real balls to it"[9] but was used because the other amplifiers used had an excessively "crunchy" sound ill-suited to layering guitars and which Lange didn't think was "commercial" enough.

In addition, all of the album's drum sounds were samples recorded by Lange and the engineers, then played from the Fairlight CMI. In a 1999 interview with Mix Magazine, Shipley noted, "'Pyromania' was done the same way, on cheesy 8-bit Fairlight technology where we had to figure out how to record everything at half speed into the Fairlight to make it sound like it had some tone to it, and we'd be stacking up a bunch of snares and bass drums." Shipley also noted that the drum sounds were dealt with last because each song's structure could change so radically, and because of technical difficulties.[9]

This unique approach sometimes led to painstaking lengths of time in the recording studio. The smash single, "Pour Some Sugar on Me", was the last song written but was quickly finished within two weeks. In sharp contrast, the final version of "Animal" took almost a full three years to be developed but was not as successful as other singles despite reaching #19 on the Billboard 100.

Hysteria has received positive reviews. Allmusic reviewer Steve Huey gave the album a rating of five stars and stated that "Pyromania '​s slick, layered Mutt Lange production turned into a painstaking obsession with dense sonic detail on Hysteria, with the result that some critics dismissed the record as a stiff, mechanized pop sell-out (perhaps due in part to Rick Allen's new, partially electronic drum kit)."[1] Huey said that album was not heavy metal and was instead a standout example of pop metal.[1]

In 2005, Hysteria was ranked number 464 in Rock Hard magazine's book of The 500 Greatest Rock & Metal Albums of All Time.[13]